Overall Rating:

Review Summary

We cruised once several years ago on Royal Caribbean, Voyager of the Seas, and had a very positive, pleasant experience, and were eager to travel with them again. We were met with the extremely unpleasant and vile odor of sewer gas while walking down the corridor to our cabin, the last one, 4001 at the end. We were disappointed and concerned to find our own cabin bathroom also emitted the odor. We immediately found our steward and brought him inside and he acknowledged the odor, but assured us it would dissipate and disappear as soon as we were out at sea and the air had a chance to clear it out. Since the ship was docked, we thought perhaps it was residue from the last cruise, and took him at his word. However, although the odor in our cabin lessened, it never left the corridor and we also smelled it in other parts of the ship. It nauseated us, ruining our appetite and affected every aspect of our cruise. Upon returning, I did a Google search on "sewer gas on cruise ships" as we did not want to encounter this again and wanted to find out if it frequently occurs on other ships, as this had not been our previous experience. The first article that came up was about crew members that had been KILLED several years ago on the VERY SHIP we were on: Monarch of the Seas. They were attempting to clear a pipe of sewer gas that they thought was empty, but turned out to NOT be empty. They died as a direct result of ingesting the toxic sewer debris and gas. Apparently Royal Caribbean has not fixed the problem on Monarch of the Seas, and is even celebrating the number of years the ship has been in use. We will never cruise on this ship again, and will carefully research to the best of our ability any future cruises with Royal Caribbean and any other cruise lines before we book again. We wondered how the current crew members deal with their constant exposure to this gas, and why Royal Caribbean hasn't either fixed the problem or retired the ship. We will be warning our friends and acquaintances about this problem and encouraging them to do their due diligence before booking cruises. We were never so glad to reach our return port and to get off that ship. For the first two days afterward we still smelled that gas, both of us. It was a very disappointing, as well as nauseating experience for both of us.

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